Affordable housing loopholes in Old Kent Road plan

Just as Southwark Council embarks on a costly legal battle to evict Aylesbury
leaseholders
from their homes it is also ploughing ahead with another plan that will
turbo-charge the gentrification of a great chunk of south London.

Up until now developers have relied upon on claiming that their profit-gushing
developments were nonetheless unviable, in order to duck out of building affordable
housing, with spectacular results – out of over 5000 dwellings in the seven
major private developments at the Elephant there will be just 82 social rented
homes.

But the likes of Lendlease, Delancey, Berkeley Homes and Barratt are evidently
becoming wary of being humiliated at Information
Tribunals
and CPO
inquiries
and want easier ways to rip affordable housing out of the local community.
Southwark has dutifully obliged.

First up, Southwark’s new planning policy for the Old Kent Road will allow
developers to define what affordable housing actually is. The term is
thoroughly discredited anyhow, with affordable rent at up to 80% market rents
and intermediate housing that requires minium salaries of
£57k, but Southwark
still think it worth driving a stake through its heart, by introducing yet
another kind – ‘discounted market rent’. This does not meet any of the policy
definitions of affordable housing and Southwark does not bother to explain how
much it reckons the market rent will be or how big the discount.

Third, Southwark has fallen in love with ‘build to rent’ private rented sector (PRS) development. Developers (eg Delancey) are desperately trying to position PRS as affordable housing, when it is nothing of the kind, and themselves as providers of affordable housing,– Southwark is doing all it can to help and is promising ‘flexibility’ on delivery of affordable housing. There will be ‘flexibility’ on family housing too, where the developer can demonstrate ‘a market demand for single/two-bed flats’. We wonder how many will, particularly when density limits and restrictions on tall buildings are being ripped up too.

Finally, the ‘subject to viability’ loophole has not been abandoned; it used to be buried down in the smaller print of previous policies, but has now been elevated right up into the policy box AAP 3: Affordable homes, just so that there is no doubt that when Southwark says that all new developments will have 35% affordable housing, it is only kidding.

These are all well-worn and familiar tactics used to avoid building affordable housing, but now they are to be enshrined in policy. Southwark aims to build 20000 new homes in the Old Kent Rd Opportunity Area, stretching all the way from the Elephant to New Cross.

All in all, Southwark’s draft planning policy for the Old Kent Road opportunity area is an open invitation to developers; it is not so much presenting itself as open for business, but rather as open to being ripped off. We have submitted a detailed response to the Council’s consultation, which you can read here.